Many adults over 40, those of us who are Baby Boomers or beyond, have personal connections to Memorial Day. We remember someone who died in a war, usually a friend or family member. We take that memory personally. Memorial Day is not an abstraction.
The day was originally set aside to honor those who died in the Civil War. That was a bit before my time, though my grandparents’ generation remembered it vividly. The U.S. has since been in at least six additional wars, depending how many you count. The scope of the holiday has been enlarged to honor people who died in all our wars, and the timing of the commemoration has moved around.
Despite the changes over the years, the day remains important to many newspaper readers. One direct result of that intense interest is that almost no matter what the newspaper prints on Memorial Day weekend, it is never enough or quite right.
This year was no exception, though the volume of calls seemed less than in some years. One reader suggested that may be because the public is more interested in a day at the beach than a day remembering personal sacrifice.
Every year some readers personally define what constitutes good Memorial Day coverage. They don’t all want the same things, but what they do want they want intensely.
Some insist coverage should be strong the day before the holiday, others on the day events take place and still others the day after.
One reader was upset that on Monday The Bee ran a picture of ethnic festival dancers larger than a photograph of two Army buddies from World War II. (The photo from the 1940s accompanied a top-of-Page-1 column that honored veterans.) That reader would have preferred the photograph of flags at a local cemetery out on the front. He knew exactly how he wanted it to look, and where it should appear. Bigger would have been better.
On the Tuesday after the Memorial Day events, The Bee ran a small Page 1 item with a photo referring readers to an inside story about President Bush and the national observance, and a Metro cover story on local activities and observations, complete with photographs.
Another reader suggested that on Wednesday — May 30 is “the real Memorial Day” — The Bee should have printed something “to say Happy Memorial Day to the geezers.” That’s a title he used to describe himself. His call was in good humor, but did express the wish that the newspaper should have recognized the original commemorative date.
Most of the calls every year come from older readers, veterans, widows and individuals who have lost a friend. Since I fit three of those four categories, I am sympathetic to their feelings even though my pragmatic side says the newspaper can never make everyone happy, and I think the paper did a pretty good job this year.
I believe the reader who suggested honoring the war dead on May 30 as “Decoration Day” instead of a convenient Monday holiday has an interesting point. If members of the community elected to take the time to go to a cemetery and decorate with flowers and flags the graves of veterans who died serving their nation, and contemplate the meaning of their sacrifice, that would indeed be good news worth improved coverage.
And The Bee could continue the struggle to satisfy the expectations of those of us who share the memories of the lost.
Night games
Several baseball fans called The Bee Wednesday morning to find out who won the Tuesday night game between the San Francisco Giants and the Arizona Diamondbacks (Arizona won). The 18-inning game lasted until about 1:15 a.m. Wednesday, beyond The Bee’s deadline capacity to report the results for all the readers.
But the fans who called this newspaper expected to find something in the paper, even if it was a short paragraph or two to explain what happened. Most readers didn’t find anything, but a few did.
Knowing many readers would be looking for the game results, and with the presses already running, the late-night sports editors inserted a note to readers at 12:50 a.m., explaining what had happened up to that point.
Then, when the game ended, a story was inserted at 1:40 a.m. into the final papers coming off the presses. The problem for editors and fans alike was that very few of The Bee’s 360,000 newspapers remained to be printed at that hour, so the majority of readers missed out.
It is relatively rare that The Bee’s final edition readers — those who live in or very close to Sacramento — miss an important game score. “I find it real surprising that The Bee had nothing,” one caller who lives in downtown Sacramento said.
Readers who live several miles away from Sacramento are accustomed to it. They receive an edition which goes to press hours earlier. But they don’t like missing game results and often let the paper know when that happens.
Readers want the newspaper to provide information, even if it is incomplete. The Giants fans who called expected The Bee to tell them the game results, or if that proved impossible, to report why that information was missing.
The fact that most readers missed seeing the final results of the Tuesday game was unavoidable. The fact that the sports editors attempted to help fans understand what happened gets an “A” for effort, even if the results missed a lot of readers.
No other newspaper I saw managed to get in the game results to Sacramento readers. Leaving readers in the dark is unnecessary. Many major newspapers have a consistent practice that fans understand. They report in all editions when a game finishes too late to get into the paper. Usually it is a paragraph or two in a box on the baseball page that explains that the game ran long, reports the score in the latest inning possible and promises to report the final results the next day. That can be covered in 25 words or less.
Despite The Bee’s generally good performance reporting on night sport contests, or perhaps because of it, missing information is a frequent complaint of sports fans served by early editions.
I suspect Bee readers who read the results of the late-night effort didn’t notice anything unusual about that. No one called to say thanks.
The unusual situation this past week served as a reminder that early edition readers have been seeking a solution to this quandary for a long time.
The Bee now needs to develop a consistent approach to handling all late games, so readers in every edition can understand when final results are not there. This past week seemed to be a positive step in that direction.
Good corrections
Several readers pointed out that the Monday newspaper’s “quote of the week,” a bodily-function political comment, was attributed to “Rep. Bill Baker, R-Danville.” Baker hasn’t been in Congress for several years, and The Bee ran a correction at midweek.
And readers with roots in the San Joaquin Valley noticed that The Bee reported that the city of Modesto was building a senior citizens residence in the city of Turlock, which seemed odd since the two are both incorporated and are about 10 miles apart. That was corrected later. The errors were apparently edited into the story.
The fact that corrections ran is commendable, but readers may still take away a few disturbing thoughts about these errors:
- Bee editors should know the geography of the region.
- Someone should have questioned why a Modesto facility would be built in another city.
- Even if editors cannot remember who serves every congressional district, that is easy to check.
- And, did the crude quote-of-the-week, comparing a U.S. senator to a hemorrhoid, inform readers about “odds and ends from the Capitol and the campaign trail”? That is how The Bee describes the purpose of the column.
